Republicans Are the New ‘Hope and Change’ Party
Twenty years ago, the left distrusted power and the right worshipped it. They’ve switched.
This week, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kash Patel are all scheduled for confirmation hearings for prominent posts in the new Trump administration.
Each is someone who, it is believed, want to disrupt and hopefully reform the roles and agencies they will be tasked with—the DNI, HHS and FBI, respectively—something the right is eager for.
Much of the right no longer trusts these agencies. They don’t trust the system.
The critics and detractors of Gabbard, Kennedy Jr. and Patel—almost all of them on the left, who function in tandem with the neoconservatives in both parties—fear this trio having any power specifically because they might use it to challenge the entrenched status quo.
The left worries they might actually confront our broken system. Democrats and their neocon fellow travelers want to protect their own interests and guard against Trump.
No matter what they say, they are less worried about whether or not Gabbard is qualified to become Director of National Intelligence than they are about how she might change their intelligence communities. Kennedy’s critics are comfortable with Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Food and Drug Administration as they exist; they don’t want an HHS head questioning how American food is regulated or bringing up how wrong the CDC got the Covid pandemic.
Patel’s detractors are worried about what he might do to their FBI. They should be.
This is also a significant switch in where right and left used to be in their relationship to the federal government.
While the American left has long sought socialisms of various sorts, in the George W. Bush years it was progressives who distrusted the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA.
Conservatives were a hard opposite. Many, perhaps most, considered unquestioning fealty to their wartime Republican president and to these institutions a nonnegotiable requirement of any real American at the time. If you even questioned the Patriot Act, were you really a patriot? Back then, progressives might not have liked Gitmo, torture, and black sites, but which of those terrorist sympathizers was ever going to protect the country like the CIA? They were our great protectors. Dick Cheney was a god.
Two decades ago, the left feared that Americans’ basic civil liberties might be lost to a government all too glad to take them in the name of fighting terrorists. Today, the left is fine with the intelligence community targeting pro-life activists, January 6 protesters and rightwing domestic “terrorists.”
On RFK Jr., it is particularly rich that Democrats now trust the CDC and FDA and their institutional integrity—hallowed protectors of public health—far more than Trump’s health secretary pick, who has some questions for Big Pharma and others. Raising awareness about corporate pharmaceutical corruption began with leftists, so many of whom have since become what Compact’s David Moulton has called “Big Pharma’s “shock troops.”
In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned and won as an anti-war, pro-civil liberties, reform-minded president. But he was neutered early on by the Washington establishment, something many lamented.
As the fiscally conservative Tea Party movement began to take shape at the end of Bush’s second term, conservatives who might have once hailed the DHS and NSA for protecting the country from jihad later found themselves on the Obama administration’s terrorist profiles and watchlists.
Progressives who once worried about Arab-Americans’ rights under Bush didn’t seem as concerned with the loss of conservative Americans’ rights under a Democratic administration fifteen years ago. By the time the Trump phenomenon began to emerge in 2015, the left was way past caring about the civil liberties of MAGA Americans. Trust in the government institutions that were once the backbone of the War on Terror era sunk to new lows among MAGA Americans.
Which brings us, again, to this week.
Tulsi Gabbard is a former Democrat from a different era. She cared about war and civil liberties then, and she still does now. She is a pariah to today’s left for never changing her tune like they have.
Robert F. Kennedy is a Democrat of an earlier time, when liberals still worried about corporate-government collusion, particularly regarding Americans’ health. Now he’s a heretic.
Democrats and neoconservatives are worried Kash Patel might wreck shop at the FBI, and he might.
Abbie Hoffman would have loved it.
The Republican Party of 2025 is now the political home of dissent, challenge, and hope that a system as broken as ours can be fixed. These are the disrupter DNI, HHS and FBI picks chosen by our disrupter president, Donald J. Trump.
Now let’s see what the new “Hope and Change” party might do.
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